@RovioMobileAngry Birds
When Nokia declared it will make a big shift, choosing Windows Mobile 7 as the primary platform for future smartphones, it's like a 2012 movie earthquake to everyone (I mean every engineer in software industry in Finland). It's not that Windows mobile 7 sucks, neither that nobody saw this coming... what hit hard was the missing of a great plan, innovation and giving a blind-eye to current stuffs - Symbian and Meego.
I know it's easy to criticize any decision. But I cannot help myself being extremely disappointed with Nokia making some 'real bad decisions'. Let's see some good points first.
- Given the hard facts that Android is taking over smartphone market within the real short timeframe of only around 2 years (and people are indeed loving the great android 'eco-system'... even I myself switched to Android and still loving it),
- - and developers are not liking to write a single line for Symbian, but loving (almost... yah Andriod is having fragmentation issues already) to type nice 'makes-sense' style codes for Android
- - and mass people are showing disgusts to sluggish, crappy and 'ugly' Symbian UIs
- - and Nokia's stock price is flushing down to the toilet
Nokia really needed a boost. So in that sense it all kinda make sense to choose Windows mobile platform. It has a good eco-system ready, people are already liking the UI and most early adopters are more or less satisfied... so why not adding superb hardware of Nokia, the awesome imaging and camera of N8 and worldwide distribution channel of Nokia?
That could work!! But...
- What about the symbian user base? Millions of users!!! and Millions more Symbian devices to come? Take the E7 which just hit the street. Even though it really has superb hardware, won't most people say, naah, Symbian may die soon, I wouldn't take the risk of buying an expensive phone for which software updates, fixes won't come.
- When is the first Nokia-Windows phone coming? Next month, next quarter, next year? I don't know... do you? Who knows? Naaah, I can't wait, I would rather buy Andriod / iPhone. At least I know their roadmaps.
- What about Qt? May be I better stop spending my time learning this stuff. Looks like currently Qt is not supported by windows phone. Will it be? I didnt hear any mention about it
- Everybody else in this phone business has other business too. Microsoft won't die if their phone platform does not fly well. Samsung won't die if their phones are not selling well. But Nokia makes only phones (+ of course the network equipments)... now a broken partnership with microsoft will be a death-blow to Nokia, but won't kill MS.
Let's take a look at the frozen white country now, Finland (I mean it's winter here now). Here this news will affect almost (luckily not all, but yet almost) every software company in Finland. If my observation is not radically wrong, almost all software companies circle around Nokia. Starting from large companies, to the end of one-man company (there are surprisingly a lot of them around here)... everyone earns big buck selling manhours to Nokia. And a great number of those hours are spent behind Symbian, S60, Ovi services, and now Qt, QML, Meego.
Now if the software comes from US, what will Nokia do with all these software people?
Yap, you'v guessed right. Layoff, shutting down hundreds of R&D projects... it's gonna be so huge that Nokia is already talking with Finnish governments
Government Help for Nokia Job Cuts
Just when Finland software industry was about to totally recover from the recession, it's another knock-out punch. Only a handful companies like Rovio will survive, but I think a lot of others will get bad bruises, if not death.
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